Abstract
Here is a crucial question in the contemporary philosophy of perception: how can we be aware of action properties? According to the perceptual view, we consciously see them: they are present in our visual phenomenology. However, this view faces some problems. First, I review these problems. Then, I propose an alternative view, according to which we are aware of action properties because we imagine them through a special form of imagery, which I call visuomotor imagery. My account is to be preferred as it offers an explanation of our awareness of action properties without generating all the problems that the perceptual view faces.
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Notes
This paper specifically focuses on the relation between action properties and vision and, thus, cannot examine the relation between action properties and other sense modalities, as well as other forms of perception. This is for a simple reason. On the one hand, the philosophical debate on action properties has been effectively taken in relation to visual experience and to the nature of the visual representations involved in their detection. On the other, the philosophical debate has been fueled by empirical results related to our best neuroscientific model of vision, ‘Two Visual Systems Model’. For this reason, I want to offer an account that does not face the problems raised in the literature on the relation between vision and action properties, while bypassing any other relation between action properties and non-visual perception. However, I am not denying that there might be interest for the problem of explaining the non-visual detection of action properties. Arguably, my account might be also extended to the awareness of action properties in cases in which our acquaintance with the object is given by another sense modality. This might also be in line with recent views of imagery as related to multimodal perception (Nanay 2018).
Or ‘space blind’, cfr. (Briscoe 2009: p. 433).
Though the motor strategies they rely on are different from those used by healthy individuals, due to their impairment in visual recognition (for a recent philosophical review see Briscoe and Schwenkler 2015).
Note that, as the examples on brain damaged patients show, conscious and unconscious seeing may be, in principle, regarded as different visual phenomena and, thus, they can be investigated, to some extent, separately (Ferretti 2017a). This is the reason why I can leave aside Q2 and focus on Q3.
However, it seems safe to say that action-guiding, visuomotor representations crucially involved in the transformation of geometrical properties of objects in action properties and motor commands, subserved by dorsal processing, are not by themselves consciously accessible (for a discussion see Brogaard 2011a, b; Briscoe 2009; Ferretti 2017a, b, 2018); later on, I will briefly refer to the evidence of the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’ (Sect. 4). This is not to deny that ventral processing can contribute to dorsal motor programming (Briscoe and Schwenkler 2015), making vision-for-action given by interstream interplay a more complex phenomenon with respect to a motor processing only dorsally subserved.
Cfr. (Siegel 2016: 4.3).
This holds for every sense modality.
Note that I am not asking about how visuomotor expertise, concerning action properties, is acquired (see Ferretti 2017a). Also, I am not saying that every time we detect action properties, we are aware of them. Nor am I asking which are the cases in which we are aware of action properties and which are those in which we are not. Sometimes we can process them unconsciously—and, since this is a sort of truism in motor neuroscience, I can bypass Q2—while sometimes we are aware of them. That said, provided that we can, sometimes, be aware of action properties, here I explain how it is possible.
For a review of the very technical details I cannot report here see (Raftopoulos 2015).
I do not want to question Nanay’s proposal here, as I do not need to undermine Nanay’s argument in order to propose my own view. Indeed, I just want to propose an alternative view that is, at once, capable of explaining our awareness of action properties, while not being subject to the kind of criticisms offered by Raftopoulos.
I am not considering the possibility of my dog’s body disappearing. If that were the case, I would be misrepresenting—whatever the format of the (mis)representation is—the presence of the dog’s body behind the door. The standard view about how we represent the occluded parts is by means of imagery (Nanay 2010a; Briscoe 2011), see below (Sect. 5).
Of course, we also see colors and other low-level properties. I will leave out color properties because they are particular properties for perception and because they are not the most relevant properties in order to perceive an action property (Milner and Goodale 1995/2006). Indeed, though color can play a crucial role, sometimes, in determining how we detect the geometrical features of the objects, geometrical features are those features that are directly transformed in action possibilities and here I am interested in the visual properties that are responsible for generating the imagery of action properties and of the related motor commands.
For an excellent review of this notion, see (Nanay 2018). For a classic discussion see (Marr 1982). This definition, often used in neuroscience (Kandel et al. 2013), follows the influential “Law of specific nerve energies” by Müller (1838/1840). According to this notion of vision, by manipulating the information contained in the retinal photoreceptors, the visual system has to reconstruct the object we get sensory stimulation from (see also Jacob and Jeannerod 2003). Of course, here I am setting aside all the conundrums within the current research about the definition of our sense modalities and the distinctions between them (see, e.g., Macpherson 2011).
Action properties can be seen as high-level properties (Siegel 2016: 4.3). If so, I need to state that, of course, I am not explicitly committed to claim that no high-level property can be part of our perceptual phenomenology (Sect. 6). Also, I am restricting the discourse here to the dichotomy between geometrical properties and action properties, as done by those interested in the topic I am investigating here (Nanay 2012a, b; Raftopoulos 2015). If action properties are taken be high-level properties, then, my account establishes that at least one kind of high-level properties, namely action properties, are not part of our perceptual phenomenology, because they are represented by means of imagery.
One may say that, if we accept that vision is cognitively penetrated, there is still room to say that, while the retinal stimulation is about the object shape, cognitive penetration alters our visual phenomenology, and this allows us to have an action property as content of our visual experience. I discuss this point in (Sect. 6).
For the detail of this process see (Ferretti 2016b).
One might argue that two subjects can have the same visual capacity to see the geometrical arrangement of an object—say, the walnut—without seeing that it is a walnut (Bayne 2009). This is something I am not considering here.
Cfr. footnote 4.
Cfr. this case with the different one of unilateral neglect discussed in (Sect. 1).
…and, one might argue, to have AP as part of her non-perceptual phenomenology.
For a similar point, defended with a different argument, see also (Nanay 2012a: Sect. 4).
Here I maintain that, though we are aware, thanks to visuomotor imagery, that we can act on the object, this being strictly related to the fact that we are aware of how we can act on the object, it is only at the subpersonal level of visuomotor dorsal processing that the very specific representation concerning the thin configuration of the hand, with respect to spatial, motor and biomechanical constraints, is achieved. Thus, our awareness of action properties needs to be accompanied by this specific unconscious process at the subpersonal level. I do not want to investigate here the relation between these mechanisms concerning ontogenetic development and the extent to which, in cases of brain damage, one process is possible without the other (for a review see Jeannerod 2006; Ferretti 2017a).
We might even maintain that the AP is part of Jade’s phenomenology. But, as I am trying to show here, that does not mean that AP is part of her perceptual phenomenology: she cannot literally consciously see AP.
Marc Jeannerod (1994, 2006; see also Sect. 5) claimed that our motor representations are always grounded on imagery, which is linked to motor preparation. I am not interested in addressing this claim here. For the notion of motor representation see (Butterfill and Sinigaglia 2014; Ferretti 2016b, Ferretti and Zipoli Caiani 2018; Burnston 2017; Mylopoulos and Pacherie 2016).
It is matter of controversy whether “in imagining action agents activate motor representations, which thereby color their imagery in certain ways” (Shepherd 2017:11; see also Brozzo 2017) or, rather, “in motor imagery one does not access motor representations, but rather sensory imagery tied to the imagined movements” (Ibid). By following Jeannerod’s idea (1994, 2006) that imagery is what makes us aware (to some extent) of our motor representations, this paper wants to show that visuomotor imagery is about the imagination of the movements we can perform on the objects we consciously see. To this extent, as said, visuomotor imagery is strictly related to the way we can process action properties on the basis of our visuomotor skills, through motor representations, at the subpersonal level. Thus, it might be very hard to distinguish between what it means to ‘access a motor representation’ and what it means to ‘access sensory imagery related to movements’.
This is not controversial, insofar as visual and motor processing can be deeply bound together through imagery (Jeannerod 1994).
Except for cases of motor learning, which requires time and motor strategies combined with (sometimes slow) action planning (Ferretti 2017a), visuomotor imagery is often automatic, as visuomotor processing in general is. Thus, its representation of the way we can act, and our awareness resulting from such a detection, is triggered involuntarily.
There might be room to show that an important neural correlate for this process, linked to the dorsal stream, is the visual area MT/V5, responsible for visual detection of motion (Milner and Goodale 1995/2006). This point deserves separate treatment and will therefore be set aside.
Dorsal stream processing might be needed in order to gain (visuospatial) awareness of action properties (Gallese 2007) even if dorsal visual representations cannot be responsible, alone, for conscious vision (Brogaard 2011a, b; Ferretti 2016a, b, c, d; see also Jeannerod 1994). This is in line with the definition of the relation between awareness and conscious vision I offer here (Sect. 3).
In this respect, the most direct way of learning to detect and satisfy an action property is by motor transfer by observing another individual performing a specific motor act. Observation, overt motor action, covert motor simulation and motor imagery share similar brain and bodily responses (Jeannerod 2006).
The original results from the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’ only challenge the idea that “fine-grained and highly accurate spatial information present in visual experience is often used to guide our bodily actions” (Briscoe and Schwenkler 2015: 1435), because “visuo-motor programming is the responsibility of a “zombie” processing stream whose sources of bottom-up spatial information are entirely non-conscious” (Ibid.; see also Clark 2001, 2007, 2009): the visual spatial information directly used to control action is not consciously accessed, as the processing of visual spatial information used to generate our visual phenomenology of a target, subserved by the ventral stream, has no causal role in shaping our motor behavior, which is triggered on the basis of the spatial information, coming from the very same target, but computed, in parallel, by the separate processing of the dorsal stream (Milner and Goodale 2008: 776; Milner 2012: Sect. 5). While these results are interesting for the analysis of Q3 (cfr. §1.1), they do not add anything crucial, from a conceptual point of view, to the analysis of Q3, Q4 and MQ. A fortiori, they do not say anything about a philosophical defense of PV when it comes to Q3. Even admitting that the neural correlates of vision-for-action, given by the interplay between the streams, can generate conscious representations, this would simply mean that we could directly consciously visually access the same spatial information of o we directly use for shaping action performance, i.e. shape information made accessible by ventral conscious visual processing would be the same that is directly used by dorsal unconscious visuomotor processing in order to generate the motor commands, instead of being registered by a parallel processing of the same source of spatial information pertaining to o for different computational purposes of recognition and action. Despite this, several Gibsonian neuroscientists have identified several portions of the streams with the neural correlates of the so called ‘affordance perception’ (Sakreida et al. 2016; de Wit et al. 2017; Osiurak et al. 2017; Ferretti 2016d). The reader might note that this claim is really problematic in the light of the philosophical considerations offered here. A complete analysis of this point goes beyond the purposes of this paper and will have to wait for another occasion.
The only thing one might say, in line with what suggested above, is that a subject can, by means of mental imagery, visualize the hand grasping the object in a given way. Someone might also claim that we only unconsciously perceive geometrical properties and that we superimpose, at the unconscious level, visuomotor imagery. This point might be tenable in the light of the evidence of unconscious imagery (Nanay 2015).
One might argue that we see different action properties at different times. But then we should explain how the visual phenomenology of the same shape can change when the power grip is part of the visual experience, as compared to the precision grip being part of our visual experience. And this leads to the trouble of relying on report of introspection mentioned above.
What Raftopoulos says about the case of neglect counts also against other arguments for the claim that action properties are part of our visual phenomenology, not only for the one proposed by Nanay. I do not need to make this philosophical point explicit here. For the complete argument see (Raftopoulos 2015: Sect. 5). He also points out that, even if we do not have an argument in order to suggest that action properties are part of our perceptual phenomenology, it may be still possible that they are. Indeed, his analysis suggests that the case of unilateral neglect does not support this claim. However, at the moment, we do not have any further empirical evidence in favour of this claim. So, as I already suggested, going for another explanation seems preferable.
Imagination is usually taken to be responsible for decisions in the future: when we decide between two possible scenarios (selecting one or another restaurant), we imagine ourselves in the two possible situations and then compare them (Nanay 2016b). My account suggests a more specific role for imagery, even for those tasks in which we thought vision were involved.
I want to warmly thank Silvano Zipoli Caiani, Chiara Brozzo and Brian R. Glenney for offering several interesting comments on early drafts of this paper. I also want to warmly thank Bence Nanay, Andrea Borghini, Albert Newen, Silvano Zipoli Caiani, Giorgia Committeri and Brian R. Glenney for spending so much time discussing with me, always enthusiastically, about the nature of the visual system. Finally, I want to enormously thank two anonymous reviewers for their crucial and constructive suggestions, which allowed me to significantly improve the paper.
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Ferretti, G. Visual phenomenology versus visuomotor imagery: How can we be aware of action properties?. Synthese 198, 3309–3338 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02282-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02282-x